Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

pictures by sweeping areas of the ruins in short arcs.
    “Multiple fixed-focus lenses,” Jao said. “Motion shifts the pattern. They must have some way of reading the result. Like Heln said, it’s the way they see.”
    “They’re not much interested in the people,” Bram said. “Or individual objects. They seem to want fields of view.”
    “Looking for another place to light,” Jao said. “The digs here are ready-made of them—honeycombed with chambers connected by a tunnel system.”
    “No,” Bram said. “We can’t allow that. We’ll be coming back here someday. We’ve got to talk them out of it.”
    “First we’ve got to find a way to talk to them.”
    The insect-people spent the next few hours exploring, completely ignoring the holiday crowd that tagged along. After a while, Bram became aware that their seemingly random forays added up to an extremely efficient search grid.
    Besides the camera, whose purpose was obvious, they used a number of other instruments. One was a long stinger that came out of a cylinder on legs and penetrated the ground to a depth of—Bram estimated by counting the telescoping sections—thirty feet, at least. The tripod gave a little jump when it hit bottom. “Their version of a thumper,” Jao said. “They’re searching for cavities.” Other instruments, with a little thought, were soon recognized as a surveyor’s transit and a range finder, adapted to the peculiar insect vision.
    The creatures seemed to get restive after a while, and after they had darted at one another in a series of little mock attacks, they all filed back to their vehicle, launched themselves up into the end of the angled tubular chassis, and disappeared inside. Bram waited, but the barrel-wheeled vehicle showed no signs of starting up.
    Heln sauntered over. “Lunch break for them,” she observed. “Or some kind of break. Whatever it is, they’ve got to take off those helmets to do it.”
    After twenty minutes passed, the creatures popped out of the end of the tube again and resumed their mysterious activities. Several of them could be observed preening their nightmare faces. Jorv appeared with an assistant, who took more pictures.
    At the end of another couple of hours, the creatures found the ramp to the parking garage under the sports arena. This seemed to excite them. There was another head-to-head conference, with eight long tail sections sticking out and wobbling, the gauntleted claspers working convulsively.
    They knew about air locks. Afraid that they might damage the locks leading to the stadium interior, Bram had been about to order that the creatures be let through while someone held the door, but one of them figured out the human machinery at a jelly-eyed glance, and they swarmed inside. They even closed it behind them.
    They seemed to be awfully good with machinery.
    “They can notice inanimate objects,” Bram puzzled, “but not a crowd of people.”
    “You don’t understand,” Heln said. “We are inanimate objects.”
    “Yar,” Jao said, as if he were an expert. “We haven’t impinged on them.”
    A thought struck Bram. “They must have seen the shuttles parked in the field on their way through. If not man, then man’s works! Why didn’t they take an interest in those ?”
    “Held no meaning for them,” Heln supplied. “Wasn’t important. Not like the air lock here. They wanted to get inside.”
    Bram spoke to his traffic control deputies. “Keep the mob outside. I won’t evict anyone who’s already in there, but I think we’d better keep the numbers down.”
     
    Without their space suits, the creatures from Sol were an unnerving sight—spiny legs, globular green eyes, and hard shiny integument bristling with stiff hairs. The four-fingered claspers at their projecting rears were pincers of horn, and the forward manipulating limbs, now revealed, were all tweezers and hooks.
    They prowled the floor and balconies of the chamber, taking no more notice of the gawking humans than humans would have taken of moss on a rock. With the boxy helmets off, the clicking noises they made to each other could be heard like a high-speed rattle of broken sticks.
    Their insect ancestry was fully apparent. “You see,” Jorv said ecstatically, “how evolution modified the exoskeleton in a way that permitted them to grow to size. It became a partially embedded, hinged, mostly external skeleton that operates as a system of levers. The extensor and flexor muscles operate